Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There are great opera singers — and then there is the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. His versatility, vocal power, incisive diction and vibrant firmness of musical line have established him as a superlative interpreter of roles from Mozart’s Figaro to Wagner’s Wotan.This summer, Grange Park Opera in Surrey, just outside London, is presenting a Terfel double bill. He plays the title roles of both Rachmaninov’s tragic Aleko (1893) — rarely performed in the UK — and Puccini’s comic Gianni Schicchi (1918); his entire physicality changes between the two. As Aleko, a jealous husband who kills his wife after discovering her infidelity, Terfel dominates the stage by stillness and by movements of hands and head. As Schicchi, a brilliant crook who is commissioned to forge a will and goes much further than anyone bargains for, the singer is restless, bending his body vividly from the waist but also energetically deploying legs and feet. He’s a dangerously naughty man of the streets born for subversive clowning, with a bright-eyed cartoon face.Both productions are modern-dress, directed by Stephen Medcalf, sharing a set by designer Jamie Vartan that is ingeniously adapted to suggest both the anarchic, nonconformist world of Aleko (with punks replacing the Roma people of Rachmaninov’s opera) and the sophisticated Florentine world of Schicchi.Ailish Tynan (soprano), Luis Gomes (tenor), Robert Winslade Anderson (bass) and Sara Fulgoni (mezzo-soprano), who also have roles in both operas, are worthy stage companions to Terfel: singing gorgeously, acting vividly. With Gianluca Marciano conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra idiomatically, and every word registering in the intimate Grange Park opera house, this double production cannot be recommended too urgently or ardently.★★★★★To July 7, grangeparkopera.co.ukAlthough Monteverdi’s seductively unnerving history opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea has often been staged in the UK since its rediscovery after centuries of neglect, it is never quite familiar. Indeed, as in this production at the Grange Festival in the south of England (note: not the same as Grange Park Opera), the piece seems marvellously unknowable.Poppea is about mainly real events — the Roman emperor Nerone dumps wife one, Ottavia, for wife two, Poppea, sending waves through the court — but Monteverdi and his librettist, Giovanni Francesco Busenello, frame it like a Homeric epic, with deities (Fortune, Love, Virtue) introducing and observing the human events. But Poppea also becomes a satirical tragicomedy about ambition and power. One near-farcical subplot involves a man (Ottone) having to dress as his girlfriend (Drusilla) to in order to try and assassinate his own ex-fiancée (Poppea). Nothing stops Poppea from marrying the monstrous Nero, and yet the opera is all circuitous suspense. Even if we know its ending — a ravishingly tender love duet of mutual absorption for Nero and Poppea — it arrives as a disconcerting surprise.The admirable Grange Festival cast, conducted by David Bates, makes every role keenly individual. Anna Bonitatibus, whose voice has such presence, makes a special impact as Ottavia (Nero’s ex) and Kitty Whately brings a disarming purity to Poppea, but Jonathan Lemalu’s Seneca is the most authoritative of all. Nero, a role often given to a countertenor or mezzo-soprano, is here the light tenor Sam Furness, who plants words effortlessly. Walter Sutcliffe’s production is elegantly modern-dress, with mobile phones and cocaine wittily playing their parts.★★★★☆To June 22, thegrangefestival.co.uk
